It's not you and it's not me...

Dear France,

We both knew this was coming, no matter how much we liked to pretend otherwise, but I guess I will be the one to say it.  It’s not you.  It’s not me either.  It’s just time.  You and I are both such hopeless romantics; we liked to pretend that love is always enough.  And, trust me, I really wish it was. 

You understand me in a way no one else ever has and when I’m with you I am my very best self.  And I love you for that.  And I love you for the little things too, like how you don’t mind if I order a pichet of wine at lunch or if I want to eat olives and cheese for dinner or if I like to take my top off when I’m hiking.  And I love how you would always sit with me by the sea.  (Remember the first night we drank champagne together?)  And I love how you always encouraged me to be in the moment, whether it was closing my eyes and just giving into a feeling or ordering some rose and violet flavored gelato because you know it was my favorite.

You should know that I cried when I left you, not just because I was sad to leave, but because I was worried that I would never be as happy or hopeful or alive as I was with you.  And I still worry that almost every day but I don’t think that is a good enough reason for us to try to make this long distance thing work. 

The truth is that love is not always enough.  Timing might not be everything but it is unfortunately something very important.  Remember, we talked about this?  There are different kinds of love and probably a few different people that could be right for each of us.  In the end it comes down to timing. And time was never on our side.  We started a love affair with a deadline, an end date, already arbitrarily set in stone.  But maybe that’s what made the time we did have together so wonderful? 

I know Shakespeare wasn’t French and I know Romeo and Juliet were Italian but it seems it would be a rather French thing to do if I were to quote them in order to make a point.  So let me make a point.  Remember how Romeo said that thing to Juliet about how partings are such sweet sorrow that he would like to say goodnight until it be ‘morrow?  Well, our parting was the sweetest sorrow of my life thus far.  And, really, it’s like we were saying goodbye from the very first moment that we realized that we had something special together, practically from the very beginning.  The love and loss were entwined and inevitable and I think each made the other all the sweeter, all the sadder. 

I used to tell you that I was nostalgic for the present, remember?  But you didn’t understand.  Language barriers and whatnot…  What I meant was that even though we were together in the moment, I was already missing it – missing you.  I was preemptively mourning the loss of how I still was.

           

And I was so happy.  I really was.  And I really loved you, just like I said I did.  And I still like to hope that maybe someday we will get a second chance to be together.  But for now there are other places that I need to be so we have to breakup because I need to be free to go to these places – these new relationships – wholeheartedly.  Right now you’re still holding a bit of my heart and I love you but I need it back.

I know it’s ironic.  I fought so hard against even giving you my heart in the first place.  When we first met I didn’t even like you very much.  I said you were too simple.  And what I meant was that it would be too easy for me to love you and I preferred a challenge.  My first love was Chicago, after all.  That city is one big case of Seasonal Mood Disorder.  It’s all hot and cold, black and white, hipsters and gangsters, rock and rap...  Loving Chicago was always a fight and I wanted to win, but that kind of love beat me down so I ran to you.  And I was right.  Loving you was so easy.  You understood my habit of being perpetually late and you appreciated my sense of adventure.  But it was deeper than that, more innate…  It was like I knew you before I even met you and then when I met you I recognized a part of myself in you. 

If the timing was different I would call us soul mates, but since the timing is what it is – and in our case it’s past – I will say that you and I are kindred souls.  And I will say that though I am breaking up with you, and though we will both move on and see other people, my soul will always understand yours.  And I hope that even if the next time I see you, I am older -- with a face and heart both a bit changed and hardened by time – I hope your soul will still recognize mine.

Toujours,

Molly

My Favorite Place

It was a December night in Chicago and I was a little drunk and more than a little miserable when the men started to play a song.  I let my hair fall over my eyes and peeked at them from between the strands as they plucked the chords of their guitars.  They were all warm eyes, dark hair, and smiles.  I was sitting backwards on a metal folding chair, trying to keep my drunken knees from knocking into the guitar that was being played to my right or the bass being played to my left. 

           

Earlier that day I had finished my last class as an undergraduate fiction writing student by reading aloud to my classmates a nonfiction story I had written about why I hadn’t been home in a very long time.  Now I was in the apartment of one of those classmates, listening to his band play while two other new friends I had made from class stood behind me. 

I liked my new friends.  I liked that they carried dark, heavy secrets like me.  I liked doing shots with them and dancing with them.  And I liked being there with them, experiencing the feeling of the music.

I liked it all much better than I liked the professor I was dating or the sex he was having with me or the other friends I was having too many martinis with, and certainly more than the now-gay ex-boyfriend that I had been dating for the past three years.

And then I loved it.

The men were only a couple lines into “Mr. Postman” when my drunken heart smiled and remembered my younger brother. They were like him and by being there with them I was like myself in a way I hadn’t been in years. 

My brother, like me, is deep, dark eyed, and a little out of place in the world.  When I was young and he was even younger and the summer days were devoid of everything but heat and music and secondhand smoke, I would play my favorite song – “Do You Believe in Magic” by the Lovin’ Spoonful – on our mother’s CD player and he and I would dance all afternoon.  As we got a little older we discovered rock’n’roll and punk rock and that the blond hair that we both grew too long was good for head-banging. 

When I think of being a happy child I am thinking of those times.  I am thinking of how my brother and I were wild and wishful children, playing tennis racket guitars and singing into wooden spoon microphones and dancing on our mother’s kitchen floor.  And then, when the day was done, returning to our separate bedrooms, each of us to write secret songs in our notebooks.

I grew up to be a writer.  He grew up to play songs.

In my classmate’s apartment, sitting between him and his bass-playing friend, holding a coffee cup of red wine in my lap, I thought of the last time I had seen my brother.  It had been a year and a half ago – before I had moved to England, before I had moved back to Chicago, and after I had already been living in Chicago for two years.  His band had won the local talent contest in our Wisconsin hometown and part of their prize had been to open for the headlining act at the town fair.  They performed on a small stage between the livestock tent and the tractor show tent.  I sat in the front row and I could not have been more proud.

The next night, the night before I left for England, my brother and I stayed up late, dancing and singing to all of our old favorite songs.  My then-boyfriend sat watching. He didn’t get it the way we did and my brother and I knew it. He didn’t feel like those songs alone could save him – or even like he had ever needed them to.

Sitting with my new friends, listening to my classmate’s band play, knowing what I knew of their secrets and seeing them smile at the songs, I wondered if they got it.

I looked over at the black leather, chains, and spikes figure of one of my new friends.  She was tossing her hair from side to side, a pretty pink smile brightening her whole face. She clasped her hands to her heart as if the men, the music, and the moment were touching something inside of her that she had lost touch with long ago.  She got it.

I was in a bad place in my life then – getting drunk and sleeping over at my professor-boyfriend’s apartment just so I didn’t have to sleep with myself and the memories of my now-gay-ex-boyfriend and, even worse, the reasons I never went home.  But at that moment, seated between the sounds of the song, with my new friends, I had a feeling that I was in the right place.  And for the moment I felt better.

Not wanting the moment or the feeling to end, I spent the next three days half drunk, half hungover, lost and found inside the songs, surrounded by new and newer friends, dancing like it was just me and my little brother on our mother’s kitchen floor.  I knew I needed to move forward and I would; I would move to France.  But at the moment I liked how time and I could move in place, twisting and turning each other in a sultry, cyclical dance of youth-without-consequences. 

A month and a half later I moved to France and I found myself happier than I had ever even thought it was possible to be.  I found more new, good-for-me friends.  I found myself enjoying my own company and the way I remained true to myself in the company of others.  I found myself jumping into a parade while confetti fell and stuck to my hair like neon colored stardust.  I found myself dancing the polka in Munich, dancing on the beach and in my bedroom, dancing with my friends and by myself.

I also found a new boyfriend.  Before our first date he asked me what my favorite song was.  I told him “New Slang” by The Shins.  On our date he told me he had listened to it but that he didn’t get it.  I told him I liked the song for the feeling and he told me he still didn’t get it.

Two months later I told him that I was worried about my younger brother.  My brother had written to me saying that he was worried that something was wrong with him because he didn’t feel as happy as everyone around him seemed.  He felt alone in crowds, inherently different and discontent.  And all he wanted was to be normal.  I had written him back saying that he just hadn’t found the right people or the right place yet.  I told my boyfriend how sad my brother’s sadness made me, how I wanted to be there to help him and to make him happy.  I told him how even though I had been almost everywhere I had ever dreamed of going, all I ever thought about was why I had left home and how I had left my brother behind.  My boyfriend didn’t say anything.  So I put my headphones on and listened to “New Slang.”  He didn’t get it.

A month later my plane from Paris landed in Chicago.  My mother picked me up at the airport and I went home to Wisconsin – home for the summer for the first time in four years.  I felt grown up and youthful, happy and hopeful.  I found my brother to be a bored, malcontent, misfit toy stuck on a metaphorical high school playground of football players and FFA members.  So since I couldn’t take him to France, I took him to the next best place.  On a whim of good-intentioned spontaneity I got in my brother’s car and together we drove to Chicago, to a place where I was sure that I could prove to him that I was right – that there was nothing wrong with him, that all he needed was to find the right place with the right people and then he too would feel right.

In Chicago, in my friend’s apartment, his band played and a party raged and my brother and I twisted and shouted to Beatles’ songs.  My friends greeted my brother as warmly and as enthusiastically as they greeted me.  And not only was I happy to see them again, but I was happy to be introducing my two favorite parts of my life to one another.  In the midst of the crowd my brother and I whispered secrets.  And when the songs blasting through the speakers were the same songs that he and I used to dance and sing along to when we were younger, I smiled at him and hoped I had proven my point.

There in my friend’s apartment, time and I resumed our old sultry, cyclical dance – both of us moving in place.  It was as if time itself had been waiting for me all those months I had been in France.  I had changed because I had needed to, but though the season had changed, the moment felt as good as ever and I felt better than ever.  And so the night hours bled rock’n’roll and blended into morning and the music played on and on – because it was good and fun and because we all knew what it was like to need a song like a Band-Aid.

I smiled as I looked around the room.  My friends, my brother and I were wild and wishful grown-up children dancing on the kitchen floor, singing along to our favorite songs.  And I was realizing that, of all the places I had been in the world, this was my favorite place to be.

The Twist in My Story

When it gets too quiet inside the house and too loud inside my head, I go to the local – the only – coffee shop in town. I pack my notebook and my book into my purse and I walk the cracked, weed-eroded pavement from my mother’s house to the Main Street establishment.  This is the kind of town where I can walk the five blocks from the house to the coffee shop and not pass a single person on the side walk or see a single car on the street. 

I order an iced latte and then I sit by myself in the very back corner.  I read.  I write.  I watch people.  I listen to the harsh, nasal tones of the Southwestern Wisconsin accent.  I never find anything of interest in the conversations I am overhearing.  My interest is in one person talking to another.  My interest is in what I want but cannot have. 

This is the third week in a row of what will eventually be nine weeks in which I will have had no one to interact with but my mother and brother and I wonder if I am driving them crazy or if that is just where I am going.  I no longer know anyone in this town.  All the places I have lived and known friends are now out of reach in one way or another.  I have grown to appreciate my transient nature – my ability to move and to change, my restless happiness – but this fact of being the intrepid outsider, or of being what I’ve been so often told is “different” and “special,” I do not like at all.

This is the point at which I question and resent my life choices.  I have been many places and made some truly good friends along the way but I have very rarely gone back and those friendships get stretched a little thin as I ask them to expand to reach out to in one country or another, this city or that state.  And I have never been very good at making the kind of casual friendships that others seem to acquire so effortlessly – the kind of friendships that fill the space and time between one meaningful interaction and the next.  (Of course, now you can see why.  As every casual friend I’ve ever attempted to have has inevitably said to me right before I decided that I didn’t like them anymore: I think too much.  At least for most people.)

And so here I am, as I so often am.  The outsider and the writer.  I don’t know which came first, myself as a writer or myself as an outsider, but I know that each feeds and antagonizes the other.  As the outsider, I am left with nothing to do but observe and analyze others and myself.  As a writer, I know how to make something worthwhile out of this mere means of passing the time.  I can reflect. I can order past events in such a way as to make them into a story or an essay or a means of making a point.  I can write about moments in which I was not invariably alone in rooms and crowds alike.  I can tell a reader a pretty story about finding myself in love or in London or swimming in the sea.  I can tell a story about how the lights of London’s Soho neighborhood smiled at me and how I had smiled because the man standing next to me looked as happy as I felt.  And I can leave it at that.  I can leave the reader, myself, and the story inside the beautiful moment and I can write it as if none of us ever left it, as if that moment still means to me now what I thought it meant then, as if life is always hyperbolically lovely. 

I can do that.  I have done that.  I do that because, as someone who is so often an outsider, I know the importance of being inside. 

And so, I write as I live.  I throw myself wholeheartedly into any life-affirming, potentially beautiful, hopefully unusual, moment that comes my way.  I strip off all of my clothes and I jump into the sea and I convince my friends to do the same because there is a castle on the shore and wine still on our lips.  And if I love you, I say it, because it’s so rare to be able to mean it that when it truly happens it deserves to be said, not because saying it will necessarily change anything but because it’s true.

For the most part, I think that most of life is nothing more than several long and lonely periods of stasis.  But it is not most of life that is either worthwhile to write about or interesting to hear tell of.  It is the moments and the people that pull me into them until I can no longer think, until I can only feel and move; those are the moments and the people who break the stasis – even if sometimes it breaks my heart.  Those are the moments and the people that matter most.  They are what I write about.  As a writer and an outsider, I know how special it is to find someone who lets me in and thereby lets me out of my head.  They are my favorite part of a story: the twist. 

And now, for a twist, let me break from my habit of writing as if all of life is hyperbolically lovely and let me say that the two different men that I have loved in London were gay and cheating on me, respectively.  In the end it wasn’t pretty.  Let me say that I have met many men who have been initially intrigued by the way I enter a room in a composed frenzy, flip my hair, fly here and there, and talk about syntax the way some girls talk about US Weekly.  They all say, “You’re special. You’re different.  I’ve never met anyone like you.”  And the ones that I’ve gone to the trouble of dating inevitably all say, “You’re too intense.  I just want someone more normal.”  That is ugly irony and nothing makes it pretty, no matter how many lovely moments elapsed between the beginning and the truth. 

Now, sitting here alone in the coffee shop, an outsider looking in on my own life, I wonder if maybe some of those moments that I like to write about were just that: hyperbolically lovely, not entirely real.  And what I want now – what I have in fact wanted for some time – is something real.  I want more of the moments that I have never written about but in which I have felt most at ease – moments of great kisses, humorously bad sex, and good music; moments in which I never felt worried that this particular man who also told me, “I’ve never met anyone like you,” would ever come to say, “You’re too intense.” 

When my friends and I swam naked in the sea we talked about the kind of moments we wanted.  They said they wanted the kind of moment strewn with rose petals and candles; I told them I wanted a moment in a dark corner of a rock’n’roll bar.  And when they said what they wanted in a man, I responded by saying that I wanted someone who would want to lay beside me and experience the feeling of a song. 

And here is the twist: since then I have gotten exactly what I wanted and now I want more of it.  What I want is not exactly a relationship, not exactly a friendship, not exactly a fling.  What I want is a way of being – a way of being myself outside my head.

We Become Each Other's Stories

In December I finished my undergraduate degree in Fiction Writing – an ironic degree because I was always more interested in the truth.  In February I moved to France, where I spent my last semester of college studying the French language and – as all good travelers do – studying life.  From the second my flight from Chicago to Paris left the ground, I began a practice that had been both encouraged and required of me as a fiction writing student, but that I had never been particularly drawn to while in school.  I began keeping a journal.  Not the typical journal that details the day’s activities, but a writer’s compulsive collection of thoughts and moments and symbolic facts.  Facts like how I brought with me to France -- along with pictures of my friends, my brothers, and my favorite Chicago landmarks – the hospital bracelet from the day I had fainted on the train and been brought into the emergency room and been prepped for immediate surgery (just in case) and had found myself in a hospital gown and a Tiffany’s bracelet, alone at the bottom of every mistake I hadn’t known I was making.

 

            I also brought with me to France a copy of the nonfiction essay (memoir-in-training?) that I had written as an assignment for my very last writing class.  This particular copy had on it the notes made by one of my classmates.  One of his notes had struck me as especially relevant: The way you, the narrator, write about other people gives the reader a sense of who you are.

           

In France I suddenly found myself writing about everything and everyone.  The compulsion to make note of a thought, feeling, or memory would overtake me nearly every day – sometimes several times a day.  One day in Paris, at the Musée Rodin, I looked at Rodin’s sculptures and saw half-remembered flashes of them as they had appeared to me long ago in a book in my mother’s dining room.  And then I saw my mother as I had forgotten ever having had seen her at all.  I saw her as tall, blonde, and beautiful; speckled in clay, making sculptures in the otherwise deserted art studio while a four year old version of myself ran around spinning the pottery wheels and playing with scraps of clay that I had found on the floor.  Sitting by the fountain in the museum garden, I made a note of this while my travel companions photographed the sculptures.

            In France I found myself not just making notes about people, but telling them as stories too.  My best friend and I would sit together on a rough, cement ledge that ran along the road outside our college and she would smoke and we would trade stories of the barely-begun romances that neither of us knew how to let go of.  My story began like this: From the moment he walked into the classroom, I wanted him.  He looked bad – not like he was ugly, the opposite of ugly, but like he was trouble – and I loved it.  I always get the guys that look good – not attractive, just like they’re nice people – and they always turn out to be the wrong kind of trouble; the kind of trouble that mixes itself up with issues I have with my mother or with my father.  But him…  He would be a hot mess entirely of my own making.

Now that I am back from France and about to start graduate school – where I will be working to complete a book-length work of nonfiction – I have set myself the task of writing the roughest rough draft of that book-length work this summer.  So every day I sit surrounded by the journals I kept while in France, my old essays, receipts that I made notes on when I had forgotten my journal, pictures, train tickets, everything that holds a memory…  And I make lists.  I list the important moments that I need to write about – like when I was fourteen, in Wales, walking alone along the rocky coastline and feeling strong and free for the very first time.  But most importantly, I list the people, for – as I once lectured the man I dated while in France – people are the most important experience one can have.

Today I sat staring at these lists of people from my life: my brothers, my best friends, men I’ve kissed, all the women in my family, every man I’ve slept with, the one that got away.   In the lists I had broken them each down to a couple important scenes that would best demonstrate to a reader who I was – as a character – based on my interactions with these people.  But the fact was that on the pages of my notebook they had become more than people; they had become stories.  They were stories about how I should have known better, about how I was proud to be my Nana’s granddaughter, about how I’ve been hurt and how I’ve survived; stories about how I evolved.

One name on the list is that of the first boy I ever truly fell for.  Beside the name I made a note: I was sixteen, going on seventeen, when I learned the fascinating trick of love: it brings us out of ourselves. He will be the story about that lesson.  Five years after the summer in which he and I were a part of each other’s lives, he is now a story about a lesson well learned.

And that is the thing that I am trying to say – the thing that unnerves me and comforts me at the same time.  We become each other’s stories.  Family is the story we inherit, but everyone else…  They are the stories told to us, the stories we tell ourselves, the stories we retell until they are no longer a person at all but an anecdote demonstrating who we were and who we’ve become.

And when I look at my lists of names and scenes, or when I read the notes I’ve made in my journals, I wonder what story I might have become for someone.  I wonder if the stories are ever similar.  I wonder if I am someone’s story of growing beyond themselves, someone’s mistake, someone’s favorite missed opportunity. 

One of my favorite twists in my story is that, after four months in France and three months dating someone else, I found myself standing in the midst of one of my favorite versions of my life: rock’n’roll music and dancing and a summer night in Chicago.  After London and Munich, Paris and Salzburg, everywhere else and someone else; there I was being kissed by the man from the story about barely-begun romance.  And there the story was, beginning again. 

I know what that story tells about me.  I know what it says I really wanted and what it says I didn’t really want.  And I wonder what story I might tell about someone.

Unmoving

The ceiling fan is broken but if I lay on my bed with my head spinning, it doesn’t matter that the fan is broken because one of us is still running in place.  It is hot here on the second floor of my mother’s house, even hotter than the summer day that stretches out down Cedar Street and Elm Street and Main Street and Water Street, all the way out to the highway and the cornfields and the cheese factories.   The heat is oppressive, smothering itself like a pillow against the willful, screaming mouth of every interesting thing that has ever happened to me. 

I can lie here all day, in this room in this house in this town that I haven’t lived in since I was seventeen.  I can lie here all day and nothing will change but the hour – and even those repeat themselves. 

In living in France it seemed like I could live an entire year in a day, a lifetime in four months.  Life really happened every day.  One day I was holding hands with a boy while fireworks shot up into the night and fell into the Mediterranean Sea.  Then then I was kissing that boy in front of the Eiffel Tower.  And then I was dancing the polka in a beer hall in Munich.  And then I was swimming naked with my best friends in the Riviera sun.  And all the while it seemed that the confetti from the parade that I had joined and danced in at the very beginning of my time in France was still falling and the feel-good music was still playing and I was still smiling and believing that I had finally found it – a life that truly felt livable.

Here in my childhood home in Platteville, Wisconsin with no one but my family for company and nothing but my memories to live (or relive), I worry that both my memories and myself will grow stale and boring before anyone has even asked to hear the story of how when I swan in the sea for the first time I was in Cannes and it was February and I was in my underwear.  And the water was cold but from where I was deep within it, I could see islands and snow-covered mountaintops.  And I had refused to get out of the water and to return to the warmth of my dorm room because I had already learned the hard way that a first time only happens once.  Moreover, so many firsts in life are shared with another person: first kisses, first loves, firsts…  This one - my first time swimming in the sea - this was just for me.  It was mine to cherish and to do with what I wished and I would make it count.

Here in Platteville, a town which uses a Cold War era siren to announce when it is twelve o’clock every afternoon, it feels like nothing counts but my eyes when they look at the calendar.  I have been here for eighteen days.  I have thirty four more days to endure. 

As I’m counting days I find myself wondering things like: how many days does it take to fall in love?  How many to fall out of it?  And I think to myself that if I had someone here to discuss such things with I would say that perhaps love is an absence of time and that it is only when we want to prove that it happens that we try to pinpoint a precise moment in which it began.  And I would say that perhaps time seems most relevant when love is over and the days until it might happen once more seem endlessly numbered.  And so then time matters for, in life, time is never a guarantee and love is a comfort because it feels like forever.

Love and travel are much the same in that they highlight the ordinary to such a great extent that it seems extraordinary.  Both love and travel bring me away from myself, to strange beds and new ways of experiencing things.  Then, when I have left who I was at my boarding gate or in the moment before my heart grew to accommodate a new love and a new loved version of myself, I find that I have come all this way only to face who I always was.

When both love and travel have ended I feel stagnant and alone, unmoving and undocumented, uninspired to make the daily journal entries that say, “This is what happiness felt like today...”

When I was young and living with my family in this small town, all I did was contemplate meaning.  I wondered what life might truly mean and what love might mean and what it might mean for me if I ever found myself in the midst of living the two.  And in spending all those years contemplating meaning I became a writer and a traveler and a lover because those are the pursuits that give me an outlet for my heart’s constant queries; those are the pursuits that give me meaning.

Now my writing becomes a cry for help and for meaning – to mean something.  This essay becomes a desperate hope that the right person will read it and will understand and will say, “Tell me your best stories and I will tell you how to get through this.”    Because here in the smothering heat there are too many days and I have too little means with which to fill them.  In thirty four days I will move to New York but until then I stare at the broken ceiling fan, letting my racing, pacing thoughts be the only source of movement in the room.  And I long to run.  I long to run away or to run back to the silvery Chicago skyline, to the sea or to the moment when I pulled away from a kiss that could have meant something. 

I have never been very good at standing still. I am great at moving; great at making a move or taking a trip, great at moving my hips in a dance or in love.  And I need to move in forward motion or else my thoughts turn back in on themselves and run through the past while my body remains stuck in a place where the only time that moves is my memories and there is no love to make the world spin, only a broken ceiling fan.

Dear Reader

This is a blog entry.

I don’t normally treat my blog as a blog.  I treat it as a place to post rough drafts of literary essays that I’m working on.  Today, however, I shall treat it like a blog.  I will address the reader.  I will write like a person, not like a person who writes. 

I will say that I know that some of you who will read this have been reading my writing since I was seventeen years old (a couple of you, even longer).  I will say that I remember when I used to post my writing on Facebook as a Facebook note and you would comment on it or email me about it.  I will say that even getting just a couple responses from a couple people who I would never have expected to read my writing – much less engage me in a conversation about it – may have helped to change my life (for the better, for the best).

I will say that many of you, each in your own time and way, have told me that you like to live vicariously through my writing – through the bold moves I make in my life and through the literal moving I do as I wander the world from one country to the next.  And I would like to tell you that while you may live vicariously through my writing, you also live with me in each place I go – on my mind and in my heart.  I keep you packed in that – my heart – the heaviest carry-on item I ever travel with.

I would like to say that I remember each of our conversations on the nature of happiness and love and time.  I would like to say that they helped me and that I if you read closely, you can see the result of those conversations in my writing – in my life.  I would like you to know that I am living the question.[1] I would like you to know that sometimes, when I meet someone new and I am talking to them, telling them about myself or just telling them my thoughts on life, sometimes you are the subtext.  When I tell a story that illustrates the fact that I have grown up to find courage and faith within myself, the subtext of the story is that our interactions – yours and mine – were part of what helped me find it. 

And while I say this to you, I say this to myself as well.  I say it in attempt to remind myself that things are not quite as I wrote them as being in my last entry.  I may have left towns and friends and countries; I may have lost time and touch.  But I didn’t forget.  I never unpacked my suitcase heart.  And I am not as alone as I may characterize myself as being.  I’ve been with you -- in coffee shops and campgrounds, small town pizzerias and paths high up in the Alps.  And when I am not with you, you are with me – in an anecdote I tell to the boy I’m falling for as we sit at an Italian restaurant on the French Riviera or in my notebook as I ride the night train on my way back from Paris. 

And I say this now to comfort myself, to reassure myself that though partings hurt - and though sometimes the best memories can become the heaviest burdens to bear – that when the next round of partings comes to pass, as it inevitably will and as it inevitably always does, I will be okay.  I will not lose myself to nostalgia any more than I must as a self-reflective writer.  I will pack up my suitcase heart, expanding it evermore to make room for these new necessities that may very well become old friends and flames but will never mean any less than they do right now.  And I will count myself lucky because, as a writer, I have the ability to taste life twice – in the moment and in retrospect.[2]  I will see you again on the page.  I will see the look in your eyes that I never learned how to read.  I will see tan skin and black stubble, a smile that made me comfortably uncomfortable and a raised eyebrow that told me you knew what I was thinking and that you liked it.  We will talk again on the page.  You will tell me once again that travel becomes an anecdote that we slip into our lives and on the page – only on the page – I will tell you that you’re right.  And I will tell you, only on the page, precisely what I was thinking every time you asked me what I was thinking and I said “Nothing.” 

And now, as a close to this blog entry, let me thank you all for reading and for giving me something to write about.

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[1] Rainer Maria Rilke

[2] Anais Nin

The Nomad

The night train rattles and whirs its way out of Paris and down through France.  I squat on the floor in the narrow hallway outside the closet sized room of bunk beds that I’m sharing with five strangers.  I suppose that at some distant point in the future this day will be a story I will proudly tell to someday.  Or perhaps I will write the story as a funny travel anecdote in my graduate nonfiction writing class this fall.  But for now, while I am in the story, I rather wish I wasn’t. 

This morning I woke up early in Salzburg in the hotel room I was sharing with my best friend, Andrea.  Together we took a train to Munich and together we stood in Terminal 1, facing each other and forcing sad smiles and saying goodbye.

“I’ll come visit you in New York,” Andrea reassured me as a final parting sentiment.

I just smiled and nodded.  She had visited me in Chicago twice in the four years I’d been living there.  And I had seen her on a mere handful of occasions on the ten or so trips I’d made to my family’s home in Platteville in the past four years.

Andrea and I had both been studying abroad in Europe this semester we had spent spring break traveling together.  This week with Andrea is the longest amount of time I’ve spent with a family member or friend (who doesn’t live in Chicago) since I left Platteville for college almost four years ago. 

I remember the last time I saw Andrea before I left for college.  She, her boyfriend Ben, and our friend David had come to my house early the morning of my departure.  The fog that hangs in the humid air of an early Southwestern Wisconsin August morning had yet to lift and the grass still sparkled with dew.  I had hugged them each goodbye.  I had hugged Andrea twice.  I had thanked them for being there to see me off.  They were my real family.  They had come together and taken care of me over that past year.  When my mother scared me and hurt me, they comforted and healed me.  When I searched for light in my darkness and a reason for the harshness of the world, they gave me compassion and understanding and they read my writing.  But we were young and what they could not give me was a safe place to stay so I left them for Chicago and an idealized idea of the safety of freedom – of being alone.

When I am not living abroad, I have been living in Chicago ever since that morning.  I am currently living and studying in Cannes, France.  Cannes is the final destination of my night train from Paris and will be the end of my long journey from Salzburg to Munich to Zurich to Paris and then – at long last – to Cannes.  I left Cannes alone over a week ago and spent a weekend alone looking at castles and cathedrals in the Loire Valley.  I also arrived, two months ago, alone in Cannes after a similarly long journey from Chicago to Paris to Cannes.  In Chicago I had gone alone to the airport, seen myself to the gate and wondered if there was something wrong with the way my life was turning out if – as it happened – I had no one there to bid me farewell as I left the country for four months. 

And today I wondered it again when I found myself alone in Paris, my wallet back in Munich.  I had no money, no phone, and no idea of who in my life might be willing to help me.  I felt terribly alone.  I was terribly alone.  This loneliness – this terrifying alone-ness – is the real price of my freedom, not degrading jobs or student loans.  This is the cost of having a safe place to stay: never staying anywhere for very long, having no one stay in my life, being a transient in apartments and countries and beds and bars and train cars.  Being a connoisseur of last looks.

My last night in Chicago I had stood on the corner of Balbo and Wabash outside a dingy 3am bar, watching my friend walk away.  Though I had promised to be back June fifth and made her promise to have a drink with me when I returned, I still found myself memorizing her black silhouette-like stature as she made her way from the South Loop bar off to the red line “L” station.  Her black leather jacket and her black leather rhinestone and spiked boots.  Her long black hair.  The wonderful feeling that I had when she was around – the feeling that nothing truly bad could ever hurt me.  She had helped me find an inner strength that I had almost forgotten to look for.  She had told me that I had helped her to be a better person.  And we had promised to not forget each other.  Whether I go back to Chicago or not, I will keep that promise.

When I finally disembark from this train I will be met at the station by a man who – I fear – two months from I will be looking at for the last time.  As an inevitable transient and thus a connoisseur of last looks I’ve recently found myself nostalgic for the present because I know how easily it becomes the past.  I know the frustration of waking up one day to find my most loved moments gone and myself alone with no way to ever get them back.  So I play the scene that I know will come in time. I picture myself months from now, silently reminiscing over the slide show memories of this man who held my hand as heart-shaped fireworks fell into the Mediterranean and kissed me in front of the Eiffel Tower and with whom I shared a fear of being average -- this man who picked me because I had subtext

The boy I left in Chicago had promised to see me once more before I left but even as he said the words my eyes had taken him in, burned his image into the black-coal bed of my heart.  His short brown curly hair. His red leather jacket.  His thin pink lips.  And the way his eyes looked at me as if they would love to keep that promise.

“I’ll see you again before you leave.  I promise,” he had said.  And my eyes had searched his and found no answer to the question that my heart begged me to ask.  I didn’t see him again.

And so it happened that our first kisses were also our last kisses.  My fingertip’s first timid touch of the silky fine stubble on his cheeks would also be my last feel of him. 

He called me right before my plane took off for Paris.  I told him I thought I could love him.  He said he thought he could love me too but that he didn’t know.  I said “okay” and I thanked him for calling and twenty hours later I was in Cannes.  We never spoke of love again.

In our hotel room in Salzburg I told Andrea that I hadn’t meant to leave for college that morning and never come back.  I told her that I was sorry for never really coming back, for leaving her behind, for – if not quite losing touch – misplacing it from time to time.  She told me that she had never expected me to come back.  Perhaps the boy who promised to see me again before I left Chicago and then didn’t keep his promise – the boy who said he thought he could love me but that he didn’t know – perhaps he never expected me to come back either.  Perhaps I never expected to come back.  Perhaps that’s why I wanted him to know that I thought I could love him – because I knew I could, but I didn’t expect to ever have the opportunity. 

The night train pushes on towards morning and as my knees grow sore from squatting on the floor in the narrow hallway so I can write while the five strangers I’m sharing a closet sized room with sleep, I think of a W.B. Yeats poem, “When You Are Old.”  I think of the part I know by heart; the part that says:

How many loved your moments of glad grace,

And loved your beauty with love false or true,

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face.[1]

From time to time I wonder if I might someday find a man who will love me for my pilgrim soul.  And I wonder too what it is that I’m making these pilgrimages for, why I am so inclined to go from city to city, country to country.  I’m not looking for love – that’s not something you’ll ever see by looking.  Nor am I looking for myself.  The only answer that ever comes to me is that I am looking for a place to stay. 

***

Almost a month has passed since my night train pulled into morning and I disembarked in Cannes, to the smiling face of the man who had made the effort to read my subtext.   This Wednesday we made a trip to Antibes to find the twin of his favorite statue from his hometown in Des Moines, Iowa. This was now our third trip to Antibes and our second trip in search of this statue.  Finding the statue was of great importance to the man, after all it was the mirror image of his favorite statue from home. 

We found the statue on the coast of the town, overlooking the sea and the port. The statue was an almost two stories high shell of a person, made entirely out of white, steel letters.  The statue’s alphabet knees were drawn up to its chest as it faced the sea, seeming to ponder what to make of itself – what to write with the many letters that comprised its being.  I loved the statue instantly.

As the man photographed the statue I read the plaque on the ground beside it.  The statue was called The Nomad.  I stared up at The Nomad.  This was the man’s favorite statue.  This tall, pensive, larger than life, person.  This nomad constructed entirely of steel letters.    

The man finished taking pictures and came to stand beside me.  He put his arms around me and, cheek to cheek, we both turned to stare up at The Nomad. 

“You’re like the statue,” he told me.  “A nomad, taking nothing with you but your words.”

“I’m like your favorite statue?” I inquired, hoping to coax out a more specific sentiment.

“Yes.”

There, in that moment, my heart smiled and hurt at the very same time.  Though I was in the moment, I was already mourning the inevitable loss of it, for I knew that this moment was the kind that I would hold as both hope and proof of something presque[2] perfect, later when my pilgrim soul had brought me somewhere new and lonely and far from that port and the language of the day.

So I memorized the way rays of evening sunlight shot between the letters of the statue before we walked away.  But it won’t be the last look that I miss, it will be the feeling of the day.  That’s the thing with last looks: they’re really just a poor attempt to capture a feeling inside an image.

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[1] “When You Are Old,” W.B. Yeats

[2] French word, meaning “almost.”